![Mad God – Tales of a Sightless City [Things You Might Have Missed 2017]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Mad-God-Tales-of-a-Sightless-City-cover-768x768.png)
“Due to either time constraints, tight deadlines, or this wonderful thing we all call life, I do miss an album or two to review in time. South Africa’s Mad God make a worthy addition to the year’s crop of doom with their self-released debut, Tales of a Sightless City.” God is mad, look sorry.
“Mindscar gets weirder the more you learn about them.” With an endorsement like that, how can you not click through?
“Here at AMG, one of my biggest challenges (besides suppressing my gag reflex when cleaning out the office refrigerator) is trying to keep my reviews to a tidy length. Between describing a band’s sound and influences, elaborating on the various songs, bitching about the production, and writing shitty and superfluous opening paragraphs, it can be hard to squeeze all my thoughts into only 700 or so words. Fortunately Aktaion’s sophomore outing The Parade of Nature is the rare record which can be accurately described in a single term: Gojira-core.” That’s better than gorilla-core at least.
“While I’m a man who has never invaded a cottage owned by bears, eaten their porridge, and slept in their beds while complaining about everything the entire damn time, I sometimes feel a bit like Goldilocks when commenting on melo-death.” It’s time to bed hop our way through the melo-death genre.
![VOLA – Inmazes [Things You Might Have Missed 2015]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/12371041_10208087369732906_1742163103346762917_o-768x768.jpg)
“VOLA are highly unusual in their approach to modern progressive metal. The most apt description I can define is prog-power by way of djent, offering the catchy melodies of Anubis Gate and Voyager but executed with the staccato, modern heaviness of a post-Meshuggah era.” Some things just sell themselves.
![The Grand Astoria – The Mighty Few [Things You Might Have Missed 2015]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/The-Grand-Astoria_The-Mighty-Few-768x768.jpg)
“Imagine, if you will indulge me, Hail Spirit Noir. Subtract the black metal, all songs but two, then add stoner rock and multiply the length of the remaining songs by four. This is as close an approximation as can be construed for a review catering to metalheads as to the sound of The Mighty Few by The Grand Astoria.” Math is hard.
“Doom fans among you will likely know about New York’s Grey Skies Fallen, a vintage doom/death act that has been steadily improving their My Dying Bride/Anathema-influenced paeans to pain since the late nineties. Grind fans among you will likely know about New York’s Buckshot Facelift, a slightly less vintage hardcore/grind band that has been vomiting up vitriolic violence since the mid naughties.” But did you know they had a shared project? You didn’t, so don’t pretend you did.
“Just about every day, Angry Metal Guy pushes out a review of an upcoming or recently released album, producing press for the album whether we love it or hate it. It exposes readers to a lot of material, but disadvantages artists who aren’t putting out music at any given time. Given a small temporal window, this creates a very biased sample of the music scene. I love reviewing albums, but a lot of great and criminally overlooked bands are in between releases right now, and it kills me to see their hard work go unseen. So in order to rectify their invisibility, they’re being talked about here, where you can be held captive by the unbreakable bonds of html and subjugated to my terrible opinions.” Next stop, Europe!
“Just about every day, Angry Metal Guy pushes out a review of an upcoming or recently released album, producing press for the album whether we love it or hate it. It exposes readers to a lot of material, but disadvantages artists who aren’t putting out music at any given time. Given a small temporal window, this creates a very biased sample of the music scene. I love reviewing albums, but a lot of great and criminally overlooked bands are in between releases right now, and it kills me to see their hard work go unseen. So in order to rectify their invisibility, they’re being talked about here, where my shitty opinions have the outsized soapbox needed to fling themselves out onto the populace like fetid water from a fire sprinkler.”
Here at Angry Metal Guy we receive a lot of e-mail. I, being the aforementioned Angry Metal Guy, am the person who checks that mail and reads through different variations on how people try to get me to listen to their band. This means that I have, in fact, gained some perspective on the process (to say the least) and I’d like to offer independent bands some helpful advice in order to better have their music paid attention to. Trust me, I’ve got 420 e-mails sitting unread in my inbox right now: you want to make sure that your e-mail is the one I open. Which leads me to my first (and primary) point, actually:
